It took six straight days of sunshine, and three solar panels with my pump pushing water Years ago, the only laminating machines I saw were either in our school’s teachers’ room or in the educational supply stores. They were very large machines that could laminate posters in less than a minute. Kinko’s (now FedEx) stores could also laminate whatever size article you had.

Now Costco sells a simple laminating machine for $20. It comes with 100 laminating pockets of different sizes. I recently purchased one of those machines.

One of the neat things about laminating a “precious” document is that the document is protected from water, food and all else. Also, whatever you have spent the time laminating is turned into a special item — one that is not to be thrown away lightly.

I recently laminated several drawings made by my now grown-up children, a few photos, my grandson’s Legoland Driver’s License, playing-card-size pictures to make both flash cards, and a memory matching game for my grandson. At lunch today, my grandson was a bit startled when I said, “Let’s put spaghetti sauce on your Driver’s License and watch how you can wipe it off the laminating plastic.” Sure enough, he was equally intrigued when he wiped off all the sauce with one fell swoop of the napkin. Fun!

I wish we could laminate three-dimensional objects so easily. There are clay figures I made that could be protected from children’s grasps with lamination. My first toy football, if laminated, might last hundreds of years.

Hey! I wish they would invent a special laminating-type machine for keeping anything you “laminated” forever. Not only would such articles be impervious to spaghetti sauce but they never could be separated from your family of origin. Oh, yes, this special laminating machine would also be able to reduce the size of anything it laminated. This is so that when I give over my collection of numerous stories, poems, essays, photos and family videos, genealogies and family documents, figurines, pop-up cards, children’s works, and whatever else there is, I don’t inconvenience my descendants too much.

Everything will fit into a specially laminated box, no bigger than a cigar box. A special reverse-laminating machine could change objects to normal.

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at Robertebsen@hotmail.com